Pregnancy is meant to be a joyful journey toward the birth of a much-wanted child, but for Emily Hainsworth the nine months was far from blissful.

She suffered from severe morning sickness throughout.

"It's soul destroying and you feel like you're failing in all senses," she said.

Ms Hainsworth is among the 1 to 3 per cent of pregnant women who have suffered from the debilitating condition called hyperemesis gravidarum, which can be so unbearable that it leads women to terminate.

It is also indiscriminate - the Duchess of Cambridge was hospitalised with the condition during her pregnancy with Prince George.

"It was the most awful, debilitating condition I've been through; you have no control over the symptoms in terms of the ongoing nausea, the vomiting," said Ms Hainsworth, who experienced hyperemesis during both her pregnancies.

"You lose time with your family, you lose the capacity to work if you were working, you're so isolated and alone, because you spend a lot of time in bed or vomiting or just dry reaching," Ms Hainsworth said.

Every single day for the duration of both pregnancies, she struggled to keep down food or even water, she was constantly nauseous, often vomiting up to 20 times a day, and very quickly lost 10 per cent of her body weight.

The condition resulted in her fluid and nutrition levels falling to such low levels that she spent weeks in hospital.

"I was admitted to the emergency department frequently, but I had longer admissions, so whereas some people present to ED every few days and go home and re-present," Ms Hainsworth said.

"Because of hydration levels and blood works, I had longer admissions."

Home services overworked and underfunded

Ms Hainsworth's husband, David, watched her struggle day in, day out, and says better co-ordination of government services is needed.

Silver Chain has been outstanding...[they] come out and help but the tap is turned off very quickly.

David Hainsworth

He believes the solution is bolstering home care nursing services like Silver Chain.

"Silver Chain has been outstanding, very helpful for us, but there are pockets of people that help but there's no co-ordination through the system, so Silver Chain come out and help but the tap is turned off very quickly," he said.

Outsourcing patients to Silver Chain is something Western Australia's leading maternity facility, King Edward Memorial Hospital, has moved toward in recent years.

"We've come a long way in terms of management of these patients," said Dr Gordon Das, the head of King Edward's emergency department.

"In the past, most of them would get admitted to the hospital and be treated as in-patients, but nowadays we've moved on from that; we're treating them on an outpatient basis."

Dr Das said that in recent years the hospital had greatly reduced the number of hyperemesis patients it treated each week by using at-home services provided by Silver Chain.

"If there's one thing that's revolutionised treatment of these patients, it's home hospital," he said.

"From a pragmatic point of view, they've cut down admissions to the hospital and they've freed up a lot of in-patient beds to help us with managing other patients."

But Ms Hainsworth said Silver Chain was hamstrung in the support it could provide.

She said nurses were only able to help once sufferers are severely dehydrated, and even then, were limited in how much fluid they could give.

"As soon as you've progressed, to a degree that they deem you don't need hydration, it's ceased," Ms Hainsworth said.

Her husband said the only way to improve the system was by raising awareness.

"I think with awareness hopefully that system becomes more efficient, which is a better outcome for the patient and a better outcome for the tax paying citizen and the government as a whole," he said.

Expensive medication another obstacle

The lack of co-ordination around services is not the only problem for hyperemesis sufferers.

The medication needed to remedy the symptoms is very expensive, an added cost sufferers like Melissa Mannix can no longer afford.

"The main medication women take is Zofran, and the cost of that one is astronomical - it ranges from $50 for 10 tablets to about $80," she said.

Zofran is the most expensive and most effective medication, but it is not listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), something women like Ms Mannix hope to change.

"I've had to slow down and stop taking some of the more expensive ones, because it's very, very un-affordable," she said.

For women with severe cases, like Ms Hainsworth, medication alone can cost up to $500 a week.

Not to mention the added cost of lost income, which David Hainsworth estimates to amount to $1,000 weekly.

"You get the double negative, because you have less time at work and there's less income coming, but you also have mounting medication bills and time spent on child care and those sorts of facilities," Mr Hainsworth said.

Michael Gannon from the Australian Medical Association says the medical fraternity would support subsiding the medication if more studies were conducted around its safety.

"I think everyone's always nervous about prescribing medication to women, especially in the first trimester, but if there was good studies to confirm the safety of one or more of these medications then we would be very much in support of PBS listing," Mr Gannon said.

For now, Ms Hainsworth hopes sharing her story will shed more light on the condition.

"Having it acknowledged, in terms of being able to get support, as in in-home support, and things like that from agencies, because it's not acknowledged, you are left struggling and fighting on your own."